Maybe He Won’t Be Back

Check out this fascinating pictorial deconstruction of Schwarzeneger’s ad on BagNewsNotes today. (Or just click the ad at left.) For those of you who don’t live in California, this ad is just pathetic, and it’s chock full of product placement. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this many brand names in a political commercial before.

But, as BNN points out, it’s also aesthetically just a terrible ad — even by political ad standards which aren’t very high. It’s not that it has some sort of cinema verite authenticity in its badness. It’s just ugly and ineffectual.

This is the mega star of the 1980’s we’re talking about here. The man whose entire claim to fame is his celebrity. Yet his people produce an ad that could have been done by someone(with lots of high placed friends in the food and beverage business) running for the San Bernardino school board. And it comes on the heels of months of very effective ads done by the public employees unions featuring the the sunny smiles of elementary schoolteachers and nurses and the rugged all American features of heroic firefighters. (Jon Stewart said “those are some MILFS.”)

I think that people expect Schwarzenneger’s ads to be professional show business quality. That is, after all, the only thing he’s got going for him. Nobody voted for Arnold because of his great ideas or policy prescriptions. He didn’t have any then and he doesn’t have any now. They did expect him to at least play the part of the Governor well on TV. But then again, he never was the actor Ronald Reagan was in the movies, either. And that’s saying something.

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